Gavin Grey: UK correspondent on SAS names and ranks being published online for over a decade

New reports reveal the identities of serving members of Britain's special forces had been published online for more than a decade.

This security breach saw the names and ranks of at least 20 elite soldiers listed in documents that were publicly accessible online.

UK correspondent Gavin Grey unpacked the mass reactions to this development. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Devin Gray are UK correspondents with US Kevin. Hello, Hi Devin,
tell me how this happened? We have serving members of
Britain Special Forces with their identities online for years.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
How yes, good question. Well, it looks like a couple
of documents were posted online. They were meant to be
for the British Army, really for those who served in
the British Army, but they were inadvertently made public for
more than a decade. The documents were published online without
password protection, and they contained details names code names used

(00:33):
to refer to the Special Forces and their operations. Now
the paper doesn't explicitly reveal these which units these soldiers
belonged to, or explanations of the code names, but quite frankly, Heather,
if you go online, or you happen to know anyone
in the military circus, you could work out whether the
name soldiers were either serving in or affiliated with an

(00:56):
elite unit like the SAS or the SBS. Now, the
newspaper that revealed this for Sunday Times says that the
publications were updated only a few months ago, and that
suggests that some of the soldiers named may even have
been engaged in live operations at the time, very very
embarrassing for forces that say that confidentiality and keeping the

(01:17):
names of those in the elite forces secret is imperative.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Que Hey, Now, how long can British Steel plant keep
going with the raw materials that have been secured.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
It looks like they've got several months ahead. Now. You'll
remember we've been reporting over the last few weeks that
British Steel is the only place in the UK where
you can make virgin steel, in other words, steel not
from recycled steel or metal, but from the virgin elements,
as it were, the oars. And it had been bought
by a Chinese owner, jing Yi, and Jingy was then

(01:48):
reported to simply be running out of ingredients and refuse
to buy any more. They were going to let it
run into the ground. British Steel is losing one point
four millions million New Zealand dollars a day, and I
think jin Ye may quite simply thought, well, we've had
enough anyway, the government's effectively nationalized it. But then the
battle was on to get these ingredients in place, because

(02:11):
once the blast furnaces go cold or are turned off,
they frankly will never be reheated and it takes a
lot of energy and time to get them back up
to speed. So the government we now know has received
fifty five thousand tons of blast. First coke that has
arrived from Australia are sixty six thousand tons of iron
ore pellets. Twenty seven thousand tons of iron ore fines

(02:33):
due to arrived from Sweden next week. The government's saying
this is a brief and a sigh of relief for
the two seven hundred employees. But the question is, Heather,
how long can you keep that loss making plant going
and make it well a reasonable request from British taxpayers.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah, well that is the difficult thing, isn't it. Agavin
listener is always good to talk to you. Thank you,
will talk to you in a couple of days. It's
Kevin Gray, are UK correspondent.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
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